Poems by Lana Bella

I fought them to exorcisetheir hatred, even my prayers fell through dirt searching for water, where rain had dried into wind.

It was said if I cry hardenough I will remember my point of departure, before I had to silence everything that left me.

So there I was, my mind's hands couldn't steeple into a reprieve,I weighed then the idea of my primordial, of becoming a knot,wrestling in leakage of moral perfidies,drawing mercy from concrete.

2) RED AND WHITE POLKA DOT DRESS

comes summer, I will dance in my red and white polka dot dress that loses its dots during winter,in fact,I have never forgotten the sun,or how the cold can endlessly protractuntil it becomes a hollow of black,

orphaned by the arrivalof such gravity, the red and white dots leap from my dress just so, pleating at the exposed tips of the fallow grass,

waiting in an infinite wait,I watch the sun tear itself from the mapleleaves, toppling down the redand white dots,spewing light in all directions,

just when I thinktheir tendons and skin would rot away, the wind bobs like gulls over surf on the mosaic dots, blowingthe excess away,

catching the red and white tails with my hands, delicately, I tuck them inside my dress' pockets, then together, we walk in search for the tattooed rhythmsof summer--3) NEAR THE BOTTOM

I wanted to tell you but my voice has gone soft like a mad crab falling noiselessly into a boiling pot, given the scale of such hindsight, I turned away, sure that my masquerade would soon pull gravity from its earthly station, holding up the edifice of our love story in the palms of the atmosphere--the story began with you eternally remembered, in this photograph of aged sepia tone and frame-less corners, I was eight and you ten, your shirtrolled up about the midriff, my left hand drapedover your thin shoulder, fingers coiled into bareflesh, and in that snapshot, I held the lump ofyour innocence in my caress--even now, I knew whose acoustics would pollute you, when the sounds of my syllables became thick with gurgles as a tired drunk strugglingwith speech, so we both ran away from this placeof longing and consolation, still, I reached out foryou, but you appeared distant, so indiscernible asto be abstract--

4) TODAY'S BREAD FEEDS YESTERDAY'S HUNGER

if you must, stick to drinking something that will dull the taste buds likelime-flavored water, for today's bread feeds yesterday's hunger,and tomorrow's swallow might just be a whisper-thin,along an old railroad track,
you plod laterally to where the dust gives way by the sagging caboose,your tongue is held down lookingfor nutrientsthat are wrung from dumpsters' cigarette smoke, your mind,bone-dry as a hundred-year old skeleton's,climbs back downthe inner worldof sawdust and tumbleweedsfor food--

5) HERALDRY

parting the currents,I hunt for lost pearl where tales of sunk ships swim among fish gutsand centuries-old heraldry,
sinking in a pulling mud so softit could be quick sand,I cannot see my feet through the air's tinted glass, even though I am holding the moon overthe night water,the pool here stirs a trail of briny seathat draws close then back,while my breaths, caught in the funnel of murk and dust stormthat prowls in the open shadows,like metallic poison seeping inside the blood stream,midway across, I pull my seat onto a stone,sensing the bed of grass playing hopscotchabout my ankles beneath the fluid fold,then one side of the conduitnegates the other,because at some point when the illusion gains speedwhile the dark gallops overhead,I become just another reflection in the water--

6) VITAEa black poem fell through the skyto a white landscape, hyphens then colons slid from cleft formation,and question marks sprung into every pore on the grim snow,you touched fingers to the cold disarray,tugging free the apostrophe keys that were pinned between the strong arm of the windand raw pine roots,chafing of skin on its powdery track,the curious teeth of the airflicked dispersed shapes of onyx-skin upside downuntil all their ink drained out,while the time-clock ticked ticking--